All, Here's a hearty thanks to our donors!
Some 32 donors gave $2,472 in November and December (that's a mean of $77 and a median of $32). We earned around $5,000 in 2007, which was essential to keeping our servers running (see below). A donor list, which omits many anonymous donations (about a third of our donations have been anonymous, actually), can be found here (it's linked from our "Donate" page): http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Donor_List You can add yourself to that list by making a donation here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Donate Even better news, however, is that Mr. Charles Boone, a retired businessman from Memphis, Tennessee, not only donated $1000 in December, he donated $5000 a few weeks ago, and we understand that more may be coming in the future. This is, I'd like to say, without really trying. I have done very little fundraising or grant writing, preferring to focus on actually building the sort of project for which grants can be plausibly written! What are our costs? As you probably know, CZ pays for three of its five servers; the bill is about $700 per month. I have been fortunate enough to make a reasonable living for myself and my family through part time writing, speaking, and consulting. So I have not paid myself anything since last fall. Obviously, I'd prefer to get paid for my full-time work organizing CZ, but if we can't afford it, we can't afford it. That's all right. I never seriously expected to earn much of a living from this in the first few years, anyway, while we're still young and growing. What we really need are funds to pay for certain kinds of work that (probably) no one will do without adequate financial incentive, including two kinds: (1) specific programming enhancements specifically for CZ (e.g., making our subpage and metadata scheme part of the database); (2) a full-time recruitment person who spends eight hours per day "getting the word out" about CZ online. I would be doing the latter myself, if I had time. Eventually, I'm sure I will. One program I hope to set up soon will be a "bounty" program, where people contribute specific amounts of money to CZ for specific tasks, whereupon we find people to do those tasks. So, if you wanted to pay $500 to CZ for someone to lead a recruitment campaign for topics related to, say, dog fancy, or whatever, then we would pay the money out to that person. For more on the general concept, see http://www.citizendium.org/contentbrokers.html If you like the idea and are interested in contributing money for some specific purpose, please let me know--that will motivate me to work on setting up that program. --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
